


As It Crumbles and Breaks

by NoStraightLine



Series: Trying to Find The In-Between [5]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Grief/Mourning, M/M, Reichenbach Falls, Suicide, give it a go anyway, major character fakes death, none of the porns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-02
Updated: 2013-05-02
Packaged: 2017-12-10 03:46:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/781398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoStraightLine/pseuds/NoStraightLine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock tips off the roof of Barts, but John’s the one who dies.</p><p>(Part Five of Trying To Find The In-Between. At this point, it’s helpful to have read the first four parts.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	As It Crumbles and Breaks

**Author's Note:**

> Part Five of Trying To Find The In-Between. At this point, it’s helpful to have read the first four parts.
> 
> Trigger warning for mentions of suicide, particularly the effects of suicide on the people left behind. If you want to skip to the next installment, here's a one sentence summary of 6K+ words: Sherlock falls, John thinks he’s dead, John grieves, Sherlock comes back. But you knew that already.
> 
> ETA: Art by slapthosecheekbones [here](slapthosecheekbones.tumblr.com/post/57709191867/favourite-quote-from-trying-to-find-the). Thank you!

Even under normal circumstances Sherlock is uncannily lupine, resembling a pale-eyed white wolf fringed with black fur, yet recognizably human. But when John finishes caring for Sherlock after the whipping and Sherlock turns his head to look into John’s eyes, John suddenly sharing a bed with a wild thing off the Nature channel. For heart-pounding seconds, he stares into blue-gray eyes just inches from his own, and considers the possibility he’s just permanently damaged his lover. All of Sherlock’s natural defences, even the foundational ones formed in the hellish cauldron of the Holmes household and public school, tempered to steel in the flats in Peckham, are gone. Sherlock is literally out of his mind.

Then the wolf blinks and Sherlock is back. Bruised and raw and sore, but he’s back.

The trust. God, the trust.

John harbors a certain pride, walks with a certain swagger he recognizes from his Army days, until Sherlock leaves for parts unknown without him. He’s gone for three hellish, fear-singed days. John compulsively checks his mobile, stays awake waiting for him, but eventually exhaustion drop him. He wakes again to the madman made of moonlight in his bed. It’s John’s turn to be laid waste. When he comes, braced on elbows and knees with Sherlock inside him, Sherlock’s hand around his cock and his breath and teeth hot on the back of John’s neck, John has to bite back words he’d rather not say just yet.

“Where were you?” John asks. He has to clear his throat twice to get the question out into the vibrating air of his bedroom.

“Business for Mycroft,” Sherlock says. But he’s got that lazily satisfied look on his face, the one that means he’s won, won big, won spectacularly big. He’s crystal clear again, razor sharp. He’s knife eyes, as the Afghanis used to call people with light eyes. He’s a laser.  
  
+  
  
  
They take a case in Dartmoor. London is Sherlock’s natural habitat, and when he has to go and be elsewhere, he becomes irrationally…irrational. John cannot believe Sherlock claims to have seen the dog, the _hound_ , stalking him and Henry on the moor. Then, when he confesses he doesn’t have friends, he has _a_ friend, John nearly makes an emergency appointment with Henry’s psychiatrist. It’s almost sentimental.

John’s having breakfast before they catch the train back to London when he realizes Sherlock locked him in the lab to test his theory, to prove he’s clever.

“It was you. You locked me in that bloody lab.”

“It was an experiment.”

“An experiment! I was terrified, Sherlock. I was scared to death.”

At least this time Sherlock didn’t risk _his_ life. Just John’s heart, thudding away in the red zone as he scrambled from cage to counter in the pitch black, clinging to the sound of Sherlock’s voice over the phone, drenched in the sickly sour flop sweat. He recognized the smell from the war. Cut into a wounded soldier’s uniform and burnt meat, blood, and battle sweat drifted into the air.  
Sherlock doesn’t apologize. John considers being offended, or hurt, or angry. In the end, he lets it go.  
  
+  
  
In between the first and second scoop of beans onto toast for tea and telly John puts the puzzle pieces together. Sherlock hasn’t been the same since he got back from the bit of business he did for Mycroft, yes, but it began before that. Sherlock turned inward around the time they realized Moriarty was behind Irene Adler.

The crop makes more sense, now, but John doesn’t fool himself. There are great gaping holes in what he knows about that particular situation, and Mycroft’s involved, somehow. That rarely bodes well for Sherlock, and by association, for John.  

He tosses the spoon into the sink, shoves the plate to the back of the counter. “Fuck,” he mutters.

He’s in. That doesn’t mean for what he likes, as long as the situation meets his parameters, or doesn’t inconvenience him. It means until the end.

The sooner this — and by this, John means Moriarty — ends, the better.  
  
+  
  
John’s patience is nearly bottomless, but he’s relieved when Moriarty explodes onto the scene again, spectacular and theatrical. This time he’s the show stopper, the big finale, the third-act climax, a wee insane Irishman wrapped in a cloak and wearing the Queen’s crown. Caught in the act as he is, the case should be open-and-shut. But Sherlock’s his arrogant self at Moriarty’s trial, and John knows it’s going to be bad.

When the jury returns an acquittal, Sherlock withdraws from everything and everyone, including John. He sits in his chair, staring into space while John peers out the window.

“Do you think I’m a fraud?”

“No. No one could fake being such an annoying dick all the time.”

Sherlock goes quiet. John remembers how he feels about being called names, but he’s afraid. He’s afraid of what’s coming, and he can’t stop it. Sherlock could, but the situation doesn’t play to Sherlock’s strengths. Brilliance flashing like lightning from behind walls of superiority and disdain won’t work, and Sherlock shows no interest in learning new tactics.

It’s aggravating as hell. “What did I say? I said _don’t get clever_.”

“I can’t just turn it off and on like a tap.”

“Most people can, Sherlock. It’s called humility.”

Sherlock ignores him. He sits in the fading pearl-gray light and stares at God only knows what. John goes to bed, leaving him to brood.  
Hours later, he decides Sherlock needs something else.

“Come to bed,” he says into the dark sitting room.

Sherlock turns his head to look up at him.

John tips his head towards his room. “Come to bed with me, Sherlock.”

He moves slowly, as if he aches, but he crosses the sitting room and follows John up the stairs, his steps uncharacteristically slow, measured. John’s heart aches watching him. John gives him the only thing he can think of that is worth anything in all of this. He’s sat with men after they’ve lost girlfriends or wives to the strain of deployments, lost firefights, lost comrades in arms. He thought he might do when he settled back into civilian life, help soldiers transition through the tough times, until they’re steady on their feet. He was good at it in Afghanistan, and the NHS hires doctors specifically to work with veterans. But he met Sherlock, and he gave that up, willingly, to stand beside the man he loves.

There’s no way around or under or over that word. Love is something to lean into. If John’s really lucky he’ll _live into_ the love he feels for Sherlock Holmes, because he loves him. He loves Sherlock. John can’t give him insight or ideas or clues. He can’t give him a different personality, or wind back the clock for a second chance. He can only give Sherlock himself, his touch and his breath, his mouth and his arms around Sherlock as they move together, silent and simple for once.

Sherlock rolls John onto his back, then spreads his legs and slides deep. The slow, thorough possession takes John apart and he doesn’t try hold back the words. They come naturally, easing out on his exhales. “I love you, I love you, I love you,” he whispers. Sherlock’s mouth hovers over his, Sherlock’s thumb strokes a bead of sweat from his temple as he murmurs the words again. Moonlight falls through John’s window onto Sherlock’s angular face; John watches Sherlock pulse beat in his strong throat and marvels at the sheer miracle of the human body, pulse and breath and brilliance, muscles and tendons and ligaments and bones all working together to create this spectacular, amazing, fantastic person John loves like he’s never loved anyone or anything before.

Pleasure stretches from one end of the night to the other. Sherlock pushes in again, his mouth working at John’s pulse, his hand on John’s cock. John’s heart races and his throat tightens as he arches and says it again — _IloveyouIloveyouGodIloveyou_ — until orgasm tears him apart.

Sherlock doesn’t respond in kind. He doesn’t comment on it at all. That’s fine. John can wait. Sherlock will say it when John least expects it.

Afterwards, John lies next to Sherlock and listens to him breathe. They need love. Sex isn’t enough. It isn’t. It’s brilliant and hot and incinerating and devastating, but it’s not enough. Sex won’t get them through this. Love will.

Eventually, Sherlock will realize that. He must. John’s not complaining, but they’re up against a wall. They can go no further like this.

Something has to happen. Something has to change.

Something has to happen.  
  
+  
  
John helps track down the ambassador’s missing children with one eye on Sherlock and the other on the shifting tide in the news coverage. The rescued little girl goes into a screaming fit when she sees Sherlock and Lestrade doesn’t dismiss it out of hand; John knows Moriarty’s scheme will be not just bad, but really bad. Everyone wants to protect children from a grave threat, and as long as there’s someone to target, the public isn’t too picky about whether it’s the right someone.

Sherlock’s an unsympathetic character at the best of times.  
  
+  
  
It’s worse than he thought. John hasn’t killed anyone for Sherlock since Jefferson Hope, but after his conversation with Mycroft, he’d willingly and cheerfully throttle Sherlock’s brother. He’s handed Moriarty everything he needs to discredit Sherlock, to destroy him. Despite the ominous consequences John’s unable to stop thinking of all of this as schoolyard games: he and Sherlock are now directly engaged with Moriarty for all the marbles. All of Sherlock’s marbles. Because despite John’s whispered confession, all Sherlock thinks he has is his reputation as a genius, a proper genius, a man who’s really clever, cleverer than everyone else.  
  
+  
  
Mrs. Hudson is shot. Leaving Sherlock in the lab at Barts, John leaves Sherlock’s side to hurry to hospital, only to learn it’s a ruse.

Oh, God. No.

He races back to Barts.

Then it gets as bad as it can possibly get. It gets like war. Impossible. Horrifying. The tips of Sherlock’s Yves St Laurent Eton leather lace-ups, black, size eleven, peek over the edge of the roof. The Belstaff settles around him like a bird settles its wings.  
  
John remembers only fragments of Sherlock’s last words, spoken in a voice so hushed and broken and humiliated John hardly recognizes it. “Watch me, John! Don’t take your eyes from me.”  
  
 _Never. I was built to watch you, to wait for you._  
  
“This phone call. It's my note. It's what people do, don't they? Leave a note.”  
  
 _No._  
  
“I did everything I could to impress you.”  
  
His phone buzzes, and he reflexively takes it from his ear. He keeps his eyes on Sherlock, but in his peripheral vision he sees the text fading from his call screen.  
  
I love you. SH  
  
“Oh, God,” he says. Or he thinks he says it. He doesn’t recognize the voice.  
  
 _You did impress me. I fell in love with you. I fell for you. Remember? I fell, Sherlock, I fell. I fell so you don’t have to._  
  
“Tell anyone who will listen that I created Moriarty.”  
  
 _You asked me what I wouldn’t do for you. I won’t lie to destroy your memory. I will not._  
  
Sherlock leans forward, over the void. The Belstaff billows, catching the air as he passes the tipping point.

John finds words, volume. “No. Don't. SHERLOCK. Sher —  “  
  
  
For one brief moment John believes with every cell in his body that Sherlock learnt to fly during all those rooftop chases. If anyone could turn a coat into wings and soar off the roof of Barts to land gracefully on the street below, it’s Sherlock. He’s just said he loves John. If Sherlock can love, then he can fly.

That’s what’s going to happen. Sherlock will fly. Moriarty will be fooled into thinking he’s dead. They will hide together, disappear, destroy his syndicate. All that needs to happen is for Sherlock to fly.  

.  
.  
.  
Sherlock flails. As if he’s trying to swim upwards, back onto the roof.  
.  
.  
.

The sound of a body hitting pavement from six stories up isn’t a crash. It’s a thud, a sodden thud, the sound of bones and muscle and brains, intellect and wit and insanity punched into a leaking sack of meat and gristle. John races into the street, is knocked to the ground by a bicyclist, then stumbles toward Sherlock, or what used to be Sherlock.

“Oh, God,” he garbles, his voice wet gravel at the back of his throat as he shoves through the shocked, clustered bystanders. “I’m a doctor. Let me through. He’s my friend. He’s my friend.”

He reaches for Sherlock’s wrist and takes his pulse. It’s useless. He knows that, can tell by the misshapen head, the blood seeping to the pavement. He’s too late.  
  
He’s failed.  
  
+  
  
Training and experience gets John through, for a little while. He’s a veteran and a surgeon who’s seen his share of trauma. John switches off and the battlefield surgeon switches on, until he stands outside Barts and watches as Moriarty’s body is loaded onto a gurney and trundled into an ambulance. Lestrade arrives, tells some story about assassins’ guns on him, John, Mrs. Hudson.

But John’s lived in a rifle’s scope for too long to give that any weight. Instead, he thinks about standing by an ambulance the first night he waited for Sherlock, desperately attracted, knowing that everything he missed about the war would be found here. Strategy, risk, adrenaline rush. A partner. A comrade. Maybe more.

But not death. It wasn’t supposed to end with Sherlock dead.

  
  
He’s fine.

  
  
But then, he goes to the morgue. Molly stands in the autopsy room. She startles when John pushes through the door. _I’m still ok_ , he thinks. _Just keep moving_.  

“Where is he?”

She steps into the middle of the room, as if she’s going to block John from the cold trays. Her hair is wildly askew, even for her, and she’s wearing some ridiculous sweater with bows. The thought that she could block John from anything at all is laughable. “You shouldn’t be here, John.”

“That’s never stopped us before,” he says.

The words echo in the whiteness, rebound off the walls, vibrate through the stainless steel instrument trays, then sink into John’s skin to his beating heart.

There is no _us_ anymore.

“Please."

There’s that voice again, the one from outside Barts he doesn’t recognize, the one that sounds like thickening cement. It’s his voice.

He will go to his knees if he has to. “Please,” he says again.

Molly opens one of the drawers to reveal a body covered by a sheet. John walks over to it, his leg twinging with every step.

“No,” Molly says, stopping his hand when he reaches to uncover Sherlock.

He can’t help it. He reaches again. Just one touch. Just one.

“No,” she says again, gentle but firm.

He nods jerkily. She retreats a few feet away, but it might as well be miles. There’s just John, and the body. Sherlock. _Sherlock._

John stands beside him, his hand twitching with the intermittent tremor as it rests first just beside Sherlock’s body, then slides back to grip the edge of the drawer. Body to drawer to body, back and forth, trembling, back and forth, until his leg threatens to give out. He pulls a chair over and sits down beside Sherlock. He sits there, waiting for whatever comes next, because that’s what he does. He sits with Sherlock, and waits.

 

What comes next is Mycroft, accompanied by Anthea, who, for once, isn’t texting. Refusing to accept insubordination from his leg, John stands to put his body between Sherlock’s and Mycroft.

“John,” Mycroft says.

 _You did this_ , John thinks. _You did this. You gave Moriarty the ammunition he needed to drive your brother, your only brother, mad. You did this._

“He’ll be cremated,” Mycroft says, apropos of nothing.

John just stares at him. Sherlock has been dead for less than an hour, and Mycroft’s already thinking about the arrangements? John remembers Afghani customs, the lengthy mourning rituals that held communities together when lives weren’t worth anything. Babies died in infancy, women died in cooking fires and childbirth, men died from wounds and accidents; everyone died from totally preventable illnesses, and that was before the war began. What about three days of mourning? What about washing the body, laying it out, and wrapping it in a shroud? If it were up to John, he would do those things for Sherlock. He’s seen it done. It’s not difficult. All he needs are his hands, a basin of water and a stack of cloths. Sponge and wipe and dab. Exchange bloodied water and linen for clean until both remained a pristine white and Sherlock’s skin is immaculate. He would swathe Sherlock’s long limbs in a linen shroud, smooth his tangled hair back, tuck the folds just so around his battered face before he covered it.

He would do all of that, and more.

“It’s what he wanted,” Mycroft adds efficiently, as if that settles it.

John finds this very funny. As risky as their lives were together, they never talked about wills, or burial arrangements, or anything else normal people would talk about as they progressed through a relationship. They talked about how Angelo’s gnocchi is mealy, how long it takes human skin to desiccate in a desert, how many blankets to keep on the bed they shared (John: two, Sherlock: none. He ran to hot). He’s been inside Sherlock’s body in every way possible, but has no idea how Sherlock wants that body handled after death.

He rubs the back of his hand over his mouth to stifle a giggle.

Yes. Cremation is appropriate somehow. The thought of Sherlock’s body embalmed and slowly rotting in the ground is obscene. Sherlock would want to be burnt. He was burning alive.

John straightens his shoulders, shuffles his feet. “Will there be a memorial?”

“A small one. Private.” Mycroft makes his civil service face, the one that looks both pained and condescending. “Public sentiment is not favorable right now.”

John thinks about Sherlock’s views on both the public, and on sentiment. He laughs until he has to be sedated.  
  
+  
  
Propped on his cane, John peers in the urn before the memorial starts. There is a large wreath on one side of the urn, and irises from himself and Mrs. Hudson on the other. The room is largely empty: an uncomfortable-looking rector, Mrs. Hudson, Lestrade, draped in a raincoat, somehow both defiant and shell-shocked. Molly. Mycroft. Anthea. When John thinks of the people Sherlock helped, of the reunited families, the valuable objects restored to rightful owners, the people who were not blown to bits whilst wearing Semtex vests, he wants to rage the building down, stone by stone.

Instead he lifts the lid from the urn and looks inside. Definitely human ash. John knows human ash. He touches the tip of his finger to the surface, then licks it. It’s gritty. Like the floor of their flat against his cheek. Like Sherlock.

Lestrade approaches him. His eyes are shocked, and the grooves on either side of his mouth cut deep. “Come on, mate,” he says. “Come on, John.”

“You look tired,” John says, surprised. “Are you all right?”

“There’s a good lad,” Lestrade murmurs as he draws John away from the urn.

John allows himself to be led to a seat. Mycroft has permitted him to speak during the service. He clears his throat, adjusts his weight between his good leg, his bad leg, and the cane. “I was so alone and I owe you so much.”

He can say no more. Not with the taste of Sherlock on his tongue.

No one else speaks. The service concludes. Mycroft takes the urn to transport it back to the Holmes plot in a small cemetery in Sussex, and the howl overtakes John, rushing him like sandstorms in the desert.

The longest in between time begins. The time between Sherlock and death.  
  
+  
  
Life becomes a gray haze punctuated by a series of moments with John’s eyes pinned wide open by unspeakable anguish. Afghanistan gave him nightmares. Sherlock’s suicide turns the time he’s awake into one long sustained daymare. He can’t sleep. He can’t be awake, either. He sees mops of black hair atop tall, slender bodies and joy pierces him. He sees coats sweeping as their owners move and has to strangle a shout.  
  
+  
  
He’s back at Barts, staring up at the roof before making his way to the morgue, the last place he was able to be with Sherlock. There he can weep. He stays away as long as he can, until grief and loss threaten to throttle him, until his throat works with howls that can’t emerge anywhere else. Late at night he lets himself into the morgue, and grieves. He slips to his knees on the floor by Sherlock’s cold tray, and grieves. With his mobile in his hand as he looks at Sherlock’s last text to him, he grieves.  
Sobs.  
Keens.  
Howls.  
  
No one notices. It’s a morgue. People cry, scream, and howl there quite regularly. The living howl, and the dead don’t hear.  
  
+  
  
Mrs. Hudson lets someone into the flat.

“You’re good to come, dear. I don’t think he’s eaten. It’s very quiet up there. ”

A soft, reassuring voice. John’s lying under the blue robe, his head on Sherlock’s pillow. The scent of Sherlock, expensive soap, his skin, rosin, is beginning to fade, and John knows a new wave of grief will swamp him when he loses Sherlock’s smell in their bed.

Slow steps up the stairs then through the dusty, echoing flat, before Sarah Sawyer peers around the door to Sherlock’s bedroom and finds John in bed. John can’t find words. He used to know words, but he doesn’t anymore.

“Oh, love,” she says quietly. “Oh, love.”

She makes tea, then food, then hands him his toothbrush with a strip of toothpaste on it. He brushes his teeth while she adjusts the water temperature in the shower, then she leaves. Some time later she pulls back the curtain. John’s sitting in the corner of the tub, water streaming over his face and clothes, pooling in his shoes. In some distant part of his mind he knows something’s wrong with the way he went about taking a shower, but he doesn’t care.

“I failed,” he said. He has to tell someone. He has to confess. She’s a doctor, like a priest. She will understand. “I failed him.”

Her face fractures. Maybe he’s going about showering correctly, because she’s fully dressed, too, when she climbs into the shower, sits beside him, and holds him.  
  
Sarah’s kipping on the settee when he wakes up in the morning. She offers to let him stay at her flat, but he refuses. She comes and goes. Food, tea, clean clothes appear, go into or on John, then disappear. A couple of days pass, or perhaps couple of months. He finds he’s interested enough in where she goes when she leaves to leave with her. After that it gets easier. He watches her do things like go to the shops, bring back food, and prepare simple meals. He copies her. She talks, he responds, but he has no memory of the conversations. She takes him to the surgery, shows him around, introduces him to people. It’s nice, like going to a foreign country and meeting friendly people who smile and pat his arm gently. One Monday morning his phone reminds him to “Start Job at Sarah’s Surgery”.

He does.

The muscle memory is there, even if he isn’t. The motions of life can comprise a life, if executed within normal tolerances.  
  
+  
  
He meets Molly for dinner, walks her home while telling the story of Sherlock and the harpoon. Somehow he kisses her, and they end up on the couch. He’s so focused on not thinking about Sherlock that he doesn’t realize she’s resisting, saying _No, no, no_ until it’s almost too late.

“God. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he says, backing away from her, then off the couch entirely.

“It’s…John,” she says as she shoves her hair out of her face and struggles upright. Her blouse droops from her shoulder, and her skirt clings to the top of her thighs. “It’s…”

If she says it’s fine, he will lose his mind.

“I just…can’t.”

Tears thicken her voice. He should listen to her, let her share her memories, let her grieve. That’s who he used to be, the man who cared for others. Instead, he can’t straighten his clothes fast enough.  
  
He goes to a pub, drinks until he can’t stand upright, then after closing he fucks a stranger in the alley.  
   
+  
  
He meets Lestrade at a different pub for a pint. It’s awkward. He’s recovered enough to recognize how awkward, but he can’t pinpoint why. A couple of weeks later he gets an invitation to a surprise birthday party for Lestrade, which can’t be that much of a surprise because John senses Lestrade’s hand in the invitation. He buys a bottle of whiskey he knows Lestrade likes, and goes.

The house is full of people who recognize John from cases. The Chief Superintendent John punched, who smirks at John until Lestrade draws him away. Donovan says hello, then goes back to showing a friend the ring on her left hand. Anderson shoulders past him and beer sloshes over John’s wrist. Dimmock talks about rugby but John tunes him out.

No one brings up Sherlock. John looks at the string of texts on his phone to confirm Sherlock existed.  

Lestrade brings him another beer. “All right, then?”

“No,” John says.

Lestrade misunderstands. “I know. Sherlock’s not here. You’re not worrying about who he’s going to offend or deduce into punching him.”

He’s right. It’s dull. John watches the crowd a while longer, then says happy birthday to Lestrade, and leaves.

On the way tube ride home John realizes Moriarty’s plan was perfectly devised for the ultimate devastation. He convinced the world Sherlock Holmes was a fraud. He convinced Sherlock to kill himself. Then he left John Watson to deal with all of it.  
  
+  
  
He sees his therapist. It’s a waste of time.  
  
+  
  
Harry sets up a weekly lunch date, which must mean he’s really, really bad off, as they still don’t get on. He goes, because she will track him down if he doesn’t and it’s easier than dealing with her. She watches him eat little and drink much, then stops him from ordering his fourth pint. Perhaps fifth.

“Don’t, John,” she says. “Don’t. It won’t work.”

The fear in her eyes strikes a chord deep inside him. It occurs to him that he once looked at her that way, afraid for her health, her life.

“All right,” he says.

He stops drinking and doesn’t notice the difference. If he can’t tell if he’s drunk or sober, why bother?  
  
+  
  
He failed. He wasn’t enough to keep Sherlock here. He’ll never be enough. He was delusional to think he could be. People die. It’s what they do. They also stop caring, disappear into themselves, go mad, commit suicide.  
  
They live as ghosts.  
  
He goes to Sherlock’s grave in a remote cemetery in Sussex, and he says all the things he wishes he’d said when he had Sherlock in front of him. He would have sat him down in their odd sitting room and made him listen, _made him see_ what John could see, even if the rest of the world was blind. “Moriarty played with your worst fears, your skewed, fucked up vision of yourself, the one other people put inside you because they don’t see you like I see you. He pushed your buttons, making you dance to the tune of the only thing you can know for sure, that you’re more clever than everyone else. But that’s not the only thing you are. I love you. You are loved.”  
  
He says them, these words he should have said, and didn’t, with regret sloshing away in his stomach. Because instead he called Sherlock a dick. He called him a name, the man he loved more than life itself. A dick.    
  
Hand on Sherlock’s tombstone, he shuffles a little, trying to find words. “There's just one more thing, one more thing, one more miracle, Sherlock, for me. Don't be…dead. Would you do that just for me? Just stop it. Stop this.”  
  
He begs — of course he _begs_ — him to stop this. He begs him to have learnt to fly.  
  
+  
  
Sherlock doesn’t stop it.  
  
+  
  
Mrs. Hudson brings him tea and cake one afternoon, and flutters around the kitchen until he says, “I know. It’s all right. I know I have to leave.”

He hasn’t paid rent for three months. She’s on a pension, and 221C is uninhabitable. Sherlock might have come up with a chemical compound to kill the mould creeping along the walls and saturating the carpet, but first he was busy, then he was dead.

Her face crumples. She stood strong when the Americans tortured her for Irene Adler’s mobile, but this, this might break her. John pats her shoulder, and reassures her that he’ll be fine, that he’d planned to move out anyway.

“It’s fi — all right,” he says. “I’m thinking of moving out of the city. Fewer reminders. I’ll get a flat…somewhere.”

He finds an efficiency flat in Dagenham, nearly identical to the one he was living in when he met Sherlock. He’s come full circle.

“A fresh start,” Sarah says cheerily when she removes the last box from her boot and hands it to John.

A fresh hell, John thinks.

The next morning he wakes up next to Sarah. They start up again, off and on. She doesn’t make any demands. She’s gentle and kind and sane. He’s grateful. Or empty. It’s hard to tell the difference.  
  
He takes the train into Westminster every chance he gets. He sits at Speedy’s. Just in case.  
  
+  
  
People can’t fly. Not even Sherlock. But he dreams it, dreams what he wishes he’d seen that day, Sherlock’s great coat spreading like wings. It’s ominous, terrifying, Sherlock descending like death come to call, his hair alive and writhing like eels around his pale face, nothing in John’s ears but the sound of his own breath and Sherlock’s coat, beating like a terrifying angel’s wings as he drifts to the ground and stalks towards John.

He always wakes up before Sherlock reaches him.  
  
He thinks about Sherlock’s expression, his intent. Does he mean for John to follow him there, too?  
  
Does he?  
  
He can’t. There is a limit to the places he will follow Sherlock. He’s not much of a Catholic but he’s seen enough death to know the waste of it, the sheer horrible waste of it, whether it’s an eighteen-year-old boy barely bright enough to get into the Army who dies screaming for his mother, or Sherlock Holmes. Death is a waste.  
  
Why couldn’t he make Sherlock see that?  
  
Because he failed.  
  
+  
  
He talks to Sherlock like he’s still alive.

Sherlock had opinions about the oddest things, like the amount of condensation in a bag of baby spinach, and John realises he’s muttering to Sherlock as he picks through the bags. “I know, I know, that one’s too wet, it’ll rot and stink, I know.”

He starts laughing, standing in a Tesco’s horrid lighting, clutching a pitiful basket of shopping. Pasta. Sauce. Frozen waffles. Bananas. Tea and cream and sugar.

Other shoppers stare. One asks, “All right, mate?”

John sets the basket next to the prewashed baby carrots and leaves.

Sarah suggests he get a new phone. He talks to Sherlock and decides against it. This one’s just fine. It’s not sentiment. He’s being practical. Frugal. When he’s alone, he reads through the thousands and thousands of text messages Sherlock sent him. He goes to the grave. “I know what you’d say,” he says, “but I’m keeping the phone.”  
  
 _I love you. SH_  
  
+  
  
He sees Lestrade, and Mrs. Hudson, and Molly. He would also call that a waste of time, except there is no better or worse way to spend time anymore. It’s become meaningless to him, carries no value as currency. He takes every shift he can wherever he can until he drops, then calls in sick for days. When he wants to it rough and hard and anonymous he fucks random men in clubs.  
  
Eventually Sarah finds out. The look on her face is punishment enough. He doesn’t see her for quite a while, but missing her is a pang compared to the howling void Sherlock left behind.  
  
+  
  
Every second, every heartbeat, is just marking time until he dies. He’s never been a religious man. Watson, JH, Catholic is what his identity tags read in the Army, but that was just because he’d been raised and confirmed Catholic. He attends mass every so often, now, because the possibility of an afterlife, anathema as it is to his scientifically trained brain, is now in play.

Would he get in? He’s saved lives, but he’s also killed people in cold blood. It’s a bit tricky. He wants to ask a priest, but in the end he can’t do it.

_Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s been decades since my last confession. I’ve killed. I’ve loved. I loved a man and I wasn’t enough to keep him from killing himself. I’ve lost.  
_

_I've failed._

_I am lost._  
  
+  
  
A woman named Mary lives next door to him. She has a bright smile and high cheekbones. She invites him over for tea or a drink, but he knows better now. After the second invitation he turns her down. It’s not fair to her.  
  
+  
  
Every so often a black car pulls up beside him. Mycroft and Anthea wait inside, then just Mycroft because Anthea’s either been promoted or made redundant, he can’t remember which. John gets in, listens to some tedious update on the progress against Moriarty’s organization.

“How do you know where I am?” he asks, interrupting some flow of information about Thailand, human trafficking, and a heroin connection in Pakistan. “Every time you just pull up beside me when I’m on the street. How do you know?”

Mycroft gives him a slightly pained smile. “Really, John.”

“The GPS in my phone? You can’t have someone following my every move on the CCTV cameras.”

Mycroft doesn’t answer.

“I can’t think why you care anymore.”

“Because you’ve never been approached by anyone…unusual?”

Not since Sherlock said _Afghanistan or Iraq?_ at Barts, but John doesn’t say that. He has been approached. Twice. The first time instinct took over; John had the man’s arm wrenched so far up behind his back he actually shrieked like a little girl before John shoved him face-first into the gutter. The second time came just days after the first anniversary. He’d spent the day at the grave, then the next day in a pub, then the next day in bed with a man who fucked him hard enough to leave him bruised inside and out, a man he couldn’t name or pick out of a lineup if someone had a gun to his head. When three armed men corner him outside a tube station, John just laughed in the leader’s face.

 _Look at me_ , he said, arms spread, face ravaged. John can look in a mirror. He looks like Carthage after the sack. _Look at me. Do I look like Sherlock Holmes is alive?_  
  
+  
  
He collects pills. It’s not hard to do. He’s careful, because Sarah’s still watching, and because he doesn’t want her to blame herself if he goes through with it. He has time. It takes him months, but eventually he has enough sedatives for an accidental overdose. That’s what it would be. Accidental.

Dying wouldn’t hurt. He knows that. He would just go to sleep, and dream of Sherlock, and never stop dreaming of Sherlock. Sherlock would arrive in his spread-wide coat, and engulf John in darkness. He hides the pills with the gun. Every so often he takes them out, holds the bottle in his cupped palm, and listens to the soft slide of the capsules against plastic. He thinks about Harry, and Sarah, and Molly, and Mrs. Hudson. Lestrade.

Then he puts them away.  
  
+  
  
A second year passes, absolutely indistinguishable from the first.  
  
+  
  
One day, one ordinary, damp, gray day, a gleaming black car pulls up beside him as he makes his way from the tube stop to Speedy’s. It’s as good a place as any to sit and watch the rain fall, or so John tells himself. The car door opens. Mycroft emerges. “If you please, John,” he said in his oily fashion.

“Fuck off, Mycroft,” he says, and keeps walking, his weight on the cane.

“John, you really should get in the car.”

“I _really_ shouldn’t,” he calls over his shoulder.

“John. Please.”

“No. Not anymore.” His leg hurts. He’s tired enough that he might sleep tonight, no nightmares, no insomnia. He’ll sit at Speedy’s until they close, then go home, make dinner, and lie in bed until he falls asleep. It’s soothing, rain. Endless patter. Like Sherlock’s voice when he was on about something.

His mobile, now held together with duct tape and a rubber band, buzzes. Just to prove to Mycroft that he’s ignoring him, John pulls it from his pocket and looks at it.  
  
Don’t be tiresome, John. SH  
  
John’s heart stops. For a second there is a lack of movement in his chest he distantly finds professionally worrisome. He stands on the pavement, staring at the text. It’s from a blocked number.

This is not possible.  
  
His heart kicks hard against his breastbone. The accompanying surge in his blood pressure creates a buzzing in his ears. He whirls, peers at the windshield of Mycroft’s large car but can see little of the driver’s face and nothing of the back seat.

This is not possible.  
  
 _How many times must I tell you? When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth._  
  
The car slides forward the few meters John’s progressed down the sidewalk, Mycroft strolling beside it, twirling his umbrella. His face shows nothing. No delight, no amusement, no pained smirk. Nothing. John looks from him to the tinted windows and back again.  
  
The car stops beside John. The door opens. Well aware that putting his head lower than his heart might actually save him from passing out on the pavement, John ducks and looks into the dark interior.  
  
Sherlock’s sitting in the far corner, mobile in hand. He’s oddly tanned, and dressed in trousers, a collared shirt, a dark gray sweater. His hair is shorter, his gray eyes alight with brilliance and triumph and an arrogance so familiar John almost forgets the last two years.  
“Hello, John.”

.  
.  
.  
John shakes his head. Blinks.    
.  
.  
.

He gets in the car.  
  
“You. You’re. You’re alive.”

Sherlock’s gaze flicks over John, gathering data, details, secrets. One black wing of a brow lifts. “Ye-es,” he says in the tone he uses to respond when someone’s rather painfully stated the obvious. “It’s been a brilliant adventure, John. Brilliant.”

Tight smile back in place, Mycroft slides into the seat opposite John, and reaches for the handle to close the door.

John shoves past his arm and catches the window frame with his shoulder as he lunges for _anywhere not in the car_. The door’s recoil sends him staggering against the rear fender, but he stumbles to the curb and onto the pavement.

Then he runs.


End file.
